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By Elizabeth LopattoBloomberg News • Tuesday January 8, 2013 6:13 AM

NEW YORK — A manned mission to Mars could be put at risk by astronauts too tired to perform
duties by the time they arrive on the planet, a study suggests.

In a 17-month simulation of a mission to Mars, four of six astronauts became increasingly
sedentary and experienced problems in performance associated with sleep deprivation, according to
research released yesterday in the journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The problems occurred early in the
mission, scientists said.

Locked in a spaceship-like habitat in Moscow for 17 months to resemble a trip to and from Mars,
the would-be astronauts performed experiments and simulated emergency activities. The most
sleep-deprived of the six crew members was responsible for about 80 percent of the errors on
assigned tasks, suggesting maintaining natural sleep cycles is crucial for the success of
interplanetary missions.

“We’re not saying this isn’t feasible, but we’ve identified these areas where we may have to do
something,” said Mathias Basner, a study author and an assistant professor of sleep and
chronobiology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

The scientists monitored the participants’ sleep during the 520-day simulation of a Mars mission
using a wrist device. Additionally, they tested the crews’ behavioral alertness. The simulation was
conducted by the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Biomedical Problems and the Russian
Space Agency.

The would-be astronauts were locked in a container in Moscow on July 3, 2010, and emerged on
Nov. 4, 2011. The six men participated in more than 90 experiments and scenarios, including
emergencies and 20-minute communication delays to their mission command. The time accounted for the
250-day trip to Mars, 30 days on the planet, and 240 days back.

Of the six crew members, only two didn’t experience some kind of sleep trouble. One crew member
developed mild depression toward the end of the mission, despite having been screened before the
simulation began.

“There were two crew members who did outstanding and adapted perfectly, and we would feel good
about sending those to Mars,” Basner said. “The other four had major problems in the domains we
were looking into.”

He suggested lights that better simulate sunlight as received on Earth might be helpful. The
monotony of the environment also might be responsible for some of the mood and sleep disruptions,
Basner said.

Many of the health issues developed early and persisted throughout the mission, Basner said.
That means that if scientists want to test potential remedies for the sleep disruptions, the
simulations don’t have to be as long.

“Probably we don’t need a 17-month mission to see them, just two to three months, which gives us
more opportunities to do more of these studies,” he said.

The research was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National
Space Biomedical Institute and others.